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Third Reich newsreels—an effective tool of propaganda?

2004; Routledge; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0143968032000184533

1465-3451

Susan Tegel,

Cinema and Media Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Publications in English include David Welch, Nazi wartime newsreel propaganda, in K.R.M. Short (ed.), Film and Radio Propaganda in World War II (London and Canberra, 1983); Goebbels, Götterdämmerung, and the Deutsche Wochenschauen, in K.R.M. Short and Stephen Dolezel (eds), Hitler's Fall: the newsreel witness (London, New York and Sidney, 1988), pp. 80–99; Propaganda and the German Cinema (Oxford, 1983), pp. 191–203; Robert Herzstein, The War that Hitler Won: the most infamous propaganda campaign in history (New York, 1978), pp. 223–258; Felix Moeller, The Film Minister (London, 2000), pp. 145–160; and R.C. Raack, Nazi film propaganda and the horrors of war, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 6 (1986), pp. 189–195. Eugen Hadamovsky, Propaganda und Nationale Macht (Berlin, 1933), pp. 25–36; an English translation appeared after the war: Propaganda and National Power (New York, 1972). See also Alice Goldfarb Marquis, 'Words as weapons: propaganda in Britain and Germany during the First World War', Journal of Contemporary History, 13 (1978), p. 493. Hans Barkhausen, 'Footnote to the history of Riefenstahl's Olympia', Film Quarterly, 1 (1974), pp. 8–12. Robert Herzstein, The War that Hitler Won, pp. 17–21. Subscribing to the notion of 'totalitarian thought control', Herzstein maintained that the Nazis had won the propaganda war and attributes their success to, amongst other things, 'inducing the population to wage an increasingly hopeless struggle'. He also provides counter‐evidence, as in a chapter on the German reaction to Hitler's war (pp. 403–431), which still does not deflect him from his central thesis. Welch, Goebbels, Götterämmerung, p. 80. See also p. 97, note 4. Ian Kershaw, How effective was Nazi propaganda? in David Welch, (ed.), Nazi Propaganda (London and Canberra, 1983), pp. 183–184. Nicholas Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda (London and New York, 1999), p. 126. L.M. Vassberg, 'Nationalism, ethnicity and language choice—the effect of nazi assimilationist policies in Alsace, 1940–1945', Ethnic and Racial Studies, 17:3 (1994), pp. 496–516. Modris Ecksteins, War, memory and politics: the fate of the film, All Quiet on the Western Front, Central European History, XII (1980), p. 71. Initially described in the Völkischer Beobachter, 14 July 1935 as 'catcalls mixed in with the applause' at the Ufa cinema on Berlin's Kurfürstendamm, they were attributed to 'Jews getting impudent and friends of Jews as long as the cinema remained darkened'. By the next day this had made the paper's front page headline: 'Jewish impudence: the incident at the première of a Swedish film in Berlin'. Catcalls rather than a demonstration are also mentioned in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 16 July 1935. For Hitler's comments, see Max Domarus (ed.), Hitler, Speeches and Proclamations, 1932–1945, I, trans. Mary Gilbert (London, 1990), p. 706. Another case of catcalls being transformed into an incident though not involving Nazis, which nevertheless got their approval, was the reception accorded to the British film Jew Süss (1934) in Vienna. See Susan Tegel, The politics of censorship: Britain's Jew Süss (1934) in London, New York and Vienna, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 15 (1995), pp. 219–244. Paul Lesch, Heim ins Ufa‐Reich, NS‐Filmpolitik und die Rezeption deutscher Filme in Luxemburg 1933–1944 (Trier, 2002), p. 88, note 298. As Lesch notes, this is still a far cry from 'riots' as suggested by Friedrich Knilli, Ich war Jud Süss: die Geschichte des Filmstars, Ferdinand Marian (Berlin, 2000), p. 155. This is evident from his Berlin Document Center file. See also Susan Tegel, Veit Harlan and the origins of Jud Süss, 1938–1939: opportunism in the creation of Nazi anti‐Semitic film propaganda, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 16 (1996), p. 523. Greven also appears as a character in the recent Bertrand Tavernier film, Laisser‐Passer (2001), which reassesses the roles of French employees of Continental Films, previously accused of collaboration. Based on the accounts of a writer and director still living, who once worked for Continental, the portrait of Greven, which emerges, is complex and not wholly negative. Gerhard Hirschfeld, Nazi propaganda in occupied Western Europe: the case of the Netherlands, in David Welch (ed.), Nazi Propaganda: the power and the limitations (London, 1983), pp. 150–154, cited in Vande Winkel, note 89. James Charrel, paper given at the XX IAMHIST Congress at the University of Leicester, 'The History of the Future: Visions of the Past', 18 July 2003. See also James Charrel, 'Entre pouvoir allemand et pouvoir français: les actualités cinématographiques en France (1940–1944)', Société et Representations, 2001, pp. 63–70. A copy of this newsreel can be found at the Imperial War Museum; it was screened at the XX IAMHIST Congress at Leicester, July 2003. François Garçon, Nazi film propaganda in occupied France, in Welch (ed), Nazi Propaganda (1983), p. 174. Herzstein, The War that Hitler Won, p. 231. Goebbels noted in his diary (11 January 1942) that audiences now applauded the Wochenschau less. See Elke Fröhlich, ed., Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels (Munich, 1996), Teil 2, Diktate 1941–1945, vol. iii, p. 92. Ufa Tonwoche, no. 472; Wochenschau, no. 558. R.C. Raack, Nazi film propaganda and the horrors of war, pp. 191–192; DW 558 (6 April, 1941) or in the Wochenschau Sonderbericht from 6 April 1941. Wochenschau, nos. 566 and 567. Raack, Nazi film propaganda and the horrors of war, p. 194, note 9. Raack redates this Polish newsreel to 1942 though the Polish archive had dated it to 1941. Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret (London, 1983), pp. 27, 110. Richard Geehr, John Heineman and Gerald Herman, Wien 1910: an example of Nazi anti‐semitism, Film and History, 15 (1985), pp. 50–64. The attempt to depict an anti‐Semite who was not a proto‐Nazi (Lueger) can by no means be construed as an anti‐fascist film, as recently described in Thomas Elsaesser with Michael Wedel (eds), The BFI Companion to German Cinema (London, 1999), p. 105. Karel Margry, Theresienstadt 1944–1945: the Nazi propaganda film depicting the concentration camp as paradise, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 12 (1992), pp. 145–162. Siegfried Kracauer, The conquest of Europe on the screen: the Nazi newsreel, 1939–40, Social Research, 3 (1943), pp. 337–357. His 'Propaganda and the Nazi war film' (1942), originally issued by the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, is reproduced in From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton, 1947), pp. 275–331. Ibid., p. 339. Kracauer gives a rough estimate for American newsreels in which the word covers 80–90% of the shots. Additional informationNotes on contributorsSusan Tegel Susan Tegel was formerly head of history at the University of Hertfordshire. She is author of many articles, and Jew Süss/Jud Süss (Trowbridge, 1996). Two of her articles about Leni Riefeustahl appeared in the HJFRT in 2003. Susan Tegel was formerly head of history at the University of Hertfordshire. She is author of many articles, and Jew Süss/Jud Süss (Trowbridge, 1996). Two of her articles about Leni Riefeustahl appeared in the HJFRT in 2003.